In A Dark Wood
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- 11,99 €
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- 11,99 €
Publisher Description
At the end of the Second World War, Jacob Noah emerges from the hole in the ground where he has been hiding for the past three years, and cycles madly back to his home town to find that his parents and brother have perished at the hands of the Nazis. Setting himself up as a shoemaker in the Dutch town of Assen, Noah patiently expands his business until he has become the most influential entrepreneur in the city.
But however wealthy he becomes, nothing can console him for the loss of his family and the tragedy of history.
In June 1980, on the eve of Assen's annual TT races, a despairing Noah sets off on a journey into the depths of his soul. Guided by a shabby, supernatural pedlar calling himself the 'Jew of Assen', he descends into the smoky heart of the town, a man-made hell modelled on Dis, the city in Dante's Inferno. In a rich and varied explosion of styles, fantasy and philosophical speculations, Marcel Möring leads us on a voyage through the dark heart of the twentieth century, and through a vivid exploration of loss and guilt.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This flat novel by the esteemed Dutch author M ring (In Babylon) is occasionally interesting but lacks much memorable material. In a sort of riff on A Christmas Carol, Jacob Noah, a Holocaust survivor turned wealthy Dutch businessman, dies in a 1980 car accident near the town of Assen in the Netherlands. On the same night, the town is home to a massive rave, and this breakneck party forms the backdrop for Noah's peregrinations with the ghostly "Jew of Assen," who takes dead Noah on a tour of the loved ones he lost contact with during his financial rise. On the same night, celibate intellectual Marcus Kopla has one last chance to win back Noah's daughter, Chaja, and though the fates of the two men don't intersect, they are linked by their love for Chaja. The novel is well conceived, and its free-form prose flows, but the characters don't come across, stripping the book of emotional impact and dramatic suspense. Moreover, the sprawling story's potentially intriguing historical and philosophical implications are never worked to their potential.
